Lake Erie advocates conduct economic study

Foundation also calls for periodic progress reports

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Jeff Reuter, former director of Ohio Sea Grant and the Ohio State University's Stone Laboratory, examines the algae in a water sample from Lake Erie earlier this month.(Photo: Jon Stinchcomb/News Herald)Buy Photo

MARBLEHEAD - While this year’s harmful algal bloom in Lake Erie is expected to be less severe than last year, advocates for the lake are not slowing down their conservation efforts to push for progress on the most prominent driver of the issue: phosphorus.

On Friday, the Lake Erie Foundation, a nonprofit organization composed of the Lake Erie Waterkeeper and the Lake Erie Improvement Association, continued its monthly summer roundtable meetings to discuss the issues at the Marblehead Peninsula Branch Library.

Though researchers keep learning more about the issue of toxic algae and providing more information to the public, Lake Erie Foundation executive director Sandy Bihn said there is a vital element still missing.

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The Lake Erie Foundation continued its summer roundtable meetings at the Marblehead Peninsula Branch Library on Friday to discuss issues facing the lake.(Photo: Jon Stinchcomb/News Herald)

The twice-weekly forecast bulletins of Lake Erie’s harmful algal blooms released throughout the summer by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, have been continually improving in accuracy and detail to offer boaters and others a near live look at the bloom as it develops.

“The good news is, they’ll tell us where it is, what beaches not to go to, you can see satellite imagery — you know where you’re at,” Bihn said.

The Sentinel-3 satellite used by NOAA to forecast the blooms captures high-resolution imagery of Lake Erie about every other day, according to Rick Stumpf, NOAA’s lead oceanographer for the forecasts.

“With the smoother data set (from the high-resolution images), we’re doing a better job of actually forecasting where the bloom is,” Stumpf said.

This satellite image, taken July 17, 2018, shows the density and location of toxic blue-green algae in Lake Erie.(Photo: NOAA)

Next year, it will be utilizing the Sentinel-3B satellite, which will capture those images every day.

“What they don’t tell us is how much we’ve gained toward the 40 percent reduction (of phosphorus pollution) and where are we on solving the problem. That’s the piece we don’t know,” Bihn said.

The 40 percent reduction was identified by researchers as the mark needed to get harmful algal blooms down to a manageable level and both the United States and Canada committed to making those reductions with the signing of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

The Western Basin of Lake Erie Collaborative Agreement, signed by Ohio, Michigan and Ontario in 2015, also established the goal of a 40 percent reduction in phosphorus by 2025.

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Researchers from Ohio State University's Stone Laboratory collect water samples from Lake Erie on July 12, 2018.(Photo: Jon Stinchcomb/News Herald)

In an effort to push for more progress toward reaching that goal, the Lake Erie Foundation is backing two projects to fill some of what they view as gaps in information on the issue.

“We don’t have a lake-wide analysis of economics,” Bihn said. “We want to take the whole lake, from Erie, (Pennsylvania), to Ontario, (Canada), and look at the economic analysis.”

The Lake Erie Foundation is managing an ongoing project performing that analysis with funding assistance from local governments in Toledo and the city of Oregon, Ohio.

The report is expected to be completed by January 2019 and will be made available for public use.

“Knowing the economy and messaging this is critical — the numbers of jobs, changes in our water costs, fish impacts — we’re looking at all those variables as much as we can,” Bihn said.

The Lake Erie Foundation is also backing an ongoing study being performed by the University of Maryland aimed at both gauging the progress being made toward the phosphorus reduction goals at the watershed level and issuing report cards periodically based on that progress, or lack thereof.

“It’s one thing to have data, but what you really need to know is how much phosphorus is coming from each watershed,” Bihn said. “From the Sandusky, to Portage, Toussaint, Raisin, Detroit, the sub-watersheds in the Maumee — we’ll break it all out.”

She said when this sort of project was done in the Chesapeake Bay region, a success story in how to deal with harmful algal blooms caused by agriculture, it sparked competition toward progress.

“If you want to take some pride in your lake, we are going to know and we are going to report every couple of years, what progress has been made,” she said. “We’re going to have a progress report out on this for the first time, which we think is critical to drive the conversation.”

It will also help answer important questions such as where dollars are being spent most effectively.

Enforcement with a project like the report card comes from the accountability created within each watershed.

“Farmers do care,” she said. “(The report card) will create internal competition for accountability. We need to make sure it’s a uniform, scientifically based accountability system that we have.”